Installations

Wood You Dance

“Wood You Dance?” is an interactive platform that enables a dancer to get a sound feedback depending on their movement and position. The system is formed by 4 pallets hooked together and 4 wood panels on top in order to enable the dancer to dance in safety. Under the wood panels there are 4 AKG 411L contact microphones that pick up every single vibration on the board, and a Shure Beta 91A condenser flat mic on the floor to pick up a bit of the acoustic wood sound and the low end frequencies. All the signals are passed through Ableton Live 9 and effected with delays, grain delays, reverse effects and reverbs all built on Max Msp and inserted through Max for Live. It has the goal of being an installation but for the purpose of an exam, we built two little servo motors attached one in front of the other on the sides of the platform with two proximity sensors attached on them that helped us limit the duration of the performance. All the sensors are managed with two Arduino Unos. After 3 minutes, the servo motors start to close and project an invisible barrier that slowly closes on the dancer. Every time she intercept the invisible rays, the sound gets corrupted by noise, making her realise that she is starting to get trapped. The performance ends when the dancer is trapped in the middle surrounded by noise.

Light Box is a project that wants to give the painter a surreal and augmented experience. Instead of the normal paintbrush, the painter is given a simple pointy light source, and is instructed to paint on a sort of canvas that is full of light sensors. The movement and the position of the light are tracked and used to create a sound feedback that is immediately sent back to the painter itself. There is no visual trace of what has been drawn, only a sound trace.
The whole system is built on an Arduino Mega that with the help of 10 multiplexers is able to take in 80 light sensors. Every value of each sensor is then sent to a Max Msp patch to be parsed. This whole task takes up a lot of CPU so all the parsed data is then sent through ethernet to a second computer that has the job to create the audio feedback from the values. All the sounds are synthesised entirely on Max Msp using self built synthesisers. There are different sound presets all of which corresponding to a certain colour.